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A call to those on the edge of sanity

Every woman knows a Jarrod Ramos. Every newsroom knows one, or seven. He allegedly murdered five people and injured two others after shooting through glass and entering the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md., having first barricaded the rear doors.

And we know why. The dead women and men may well have recognized the man who shot them. Ramos stated his mad, twisted reasons online and burned with rage for years about the paper’s imagined wrongs. He created fake Twitter accounts for a judge he hated and for the brave columnist who had written about his terrifying stalking of a young woman.

Lynne Griffin pays her respects at a makeshift memorial near the Capital Gazette where five people were shot to death by a gunman on Thursday in Annapolis, Maryland. Griffin was a journalism student under John McNamara, who was one of the people killed at the paper. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

This is why many newsrooms have security guards, locked doors and staff at a front desk to control the locks, not that it would help. It didn’t in this case.

In 2011, columnist Eric Hartley (now working elsewhere and not a shooting victim) had written a crisp piece in the Gazette on a court case about the prolonged and terrifying stalking of a local woman. It was headlined “Jarrod wants to be your friend.”

In 2009, Ramos, who had a degree in computer science and, later, a foot-long beard braided at the neck, told a young local woman on Facebook that she was the only person who had ever been kind to him in high school.

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Ever polite as women are raised to be, she did not remember him but did some research, found that they had both attended that school, and sent a kind message.

“He was having some problems,” Hartley wrote, “so she wrote back and tried to help, suggesting a counselling centre. ‘I just thought I was being friendly,’ she said.”

Ramos exploded and the hunt was on. He scoured every aspect of her life online and pestered her for months, asking for help, then calling her vile names and advising her to kill herself, while sending messages to her employer saying she should be fired. She was fired. “You’re going to need (sic) restraining order now,” he said.

She had to move three times and began sleeping with a gun nearby. He was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour stalking charge. No male judges or lawyers understood what a danger Ramos was, nor the victim’s certainty that she would die.

But Hartley understood and the Gazette ran the column, which was based on public court documents. Ramos sued Hartley, the paper and its publisher but failed, appealed, failed again and embarked on seven years of obsessive harassment.

Then-publisher Tom Marquardt on Thursday told the Baltimore Sun, “I remember telling our attorneys, ‘This is a guy who is going to come in and shoot us.’” He told another paper that he had asked police to intervene in 2013. “I was worried about my well-being, my wife’s well-being, and the staff’s ... [The police] didn’t think there was a case.”

It’s not clear what sent Ramos out on his alleged killing spree but U.S. President Donald Trump’s constant demonizing of journalists — and many other groups — call out to those on the edge of sanity.

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The devilizing continued online before the bodies were cold. Fox News first checked to see if the paper was Republican or Democratic, as if the blood of the dead could be blue rather than red.

Women know a lot about stalkers. Women journalists know so many that they keep files on them labelled “package,” “lawsuit,” “John Beach” or simply “him,” to give the police somewhere to start should anything happen.

I recall a man who wrote to me for 11 years to tell me how much he hated me, tracking me through jobs in three newsrooms. I have had male journalists, nice guys, say casually not to worry. The guy’s not violent, they say, mansplainers of psychopathy.

I disagree. Ramos wrote “F--- you, leave me alone” to his prey. It’s from a ubiquitous YouTube clip, the words shouted over and over, endlessly. He wrote this again just before he is alleged to have left with his gun for the Capital office.

My advice? Read Gavin De Becker’s The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence and give it to your daughters. It tells women to forget courtesy and follow their instincts about danger.

Do not get on the elevator with that man. Do not respond to a stalker. Keep evidence on file. Wear shoes you can run in. You do not have to open mail. Work from home if it’s safer.

These are things that women have to know. Men should understand why.

Jarrod Ramoses are always around. They live alone or with their mothers and spend their days and nights online. They have time on their hands. Fox, Breitbart and uglier outliers — always misogynistic, always racist — feed their paranoia. In a nation where guns outnumber humans, it’s easy to kill.

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